Mark, can you touch on the modular building sets and how we go about designing and creating those?
TL;DRMark Skelton says varied modular locations will come from a few base architectural styles, history-rich destinations, and props, lighting and material-driven theme changes that can show things like economic ruin.
In the last panel, we didn't quite get to the question, but the question was: okay, so you've got all these hundreds of places that you're going to go, and obviously we're going to have to have a tier system way of looking at it. How are we going to make these all different? How are we going to make them different enough where it's just not the same thing over and over and over? So we've been thinking about that quite a bit. We just had an environment summit not too long ago to talk about some of these issues. One of the things that we broke it down to is architectural styles. So we have pillars of architectural styles, which you guys have seen already. The Self-Land, the AeroView, and the Revel & York hangars are kind of pinnacle styles of the low tech, high tech, and super modernism, which are our base first run at making a modular system and to see how far we can go with those. Now, obviously the architectural styles are going to expand. I know Chris wants history, which is huge from an art direction point of view. These environment locations have got to have history, and they do. A lot of them have it in the stuff that has been written for Star Citizen. There's tons of history to draw from and tons of things that have happened on any particular landing site location that, as an art director, gives me something to grab onto and be able to expand and give detail to. The more history someplace has, the more detail that you can pull out of it. And we've also been talking about places like Terra Prime and stuff like that, that are not only just places to visit, but they're destination places, where you have this idea of exploring the universe and actually, like going to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower or going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. We want to convey that in Star Citizen, and the way to do that is to have historical places that you go visit and significant things that happen within the universe, and you're like, oh man, I want to go see that. Well, okay, you can, and it's on Terra Prime, and there's a big statue there of an important thing or an important person. So these architectural styles kind of feed into that. And what we can do is we can take historical styles and also mix them with modern styles, because, as you know, in Seattle and a lot of places, what they'll do is, as the culture evolves and the architecture evolves, they'll build on top of stuff. Or I'm sure you'll visit locations that are ruined, so you'll land someplace and see that there was a big battle here at some point. So all these architectural styles are being worked out as far as the tier goes, for the breadth and the width of what we want to achieve. So a lot of these things are going to be: you'll have a base architectural style that you start with. And then, like we were saying before, there are other things that you can put with it, like props and lighting changes. And there's a thing called theme changes, which we're doing, and which the ships have been doing quite a bit of. And that's using a blend system to be able to convey things like economic ruin. So you go to a planet, it's nice, you come back a month later, it's in ruins. It's got spray paint on the wall and it's rusted out. The economy has just totally gone south and things are looking bad. And we obviously want to convey that through the architecture also. So we've been putting some thought and time into creating these things with themes embedded in them, which are controllable by materials.